NFL: Underinflated Balls?

[WreckingCrew]

@Hentor_the_Barbarian

Also interesting, WreckingCrew, is that the demonstration you reported on used a bottom end temperature of 39 degrees. Why was this?

According to the Weather Underground, the temperature never fell below 50 degrees during the first half of the game.

Local Weather Forecast, News and Conditions | Weather Underground

Based on the rate of change in the demonstration, this would have put the on-the-field deflation at 1.31, meaning that by 4 minutes return to baseline temp, the pre- post deflation would have been 0.31.

Because that was the conditions the guy who ran the test had at his house.

From my original post: “Now, I know: 1 guy, Pats fan, single data point, not the same conditions . . . fine. I am not using this data to prove or disprove what the Patriots did, or did not do, to the game balls, just as a point of interest to this discussion.”

So again, I did not present this data to prove or disprove what did happen during the game. It is a single experiment that shows that footballs that are taken out of room temperature, placed in a colder environment, and then returned to the original room temperature will:

A: show a decrease in PSI after time in the colder environment, and
B: return to approximately the original PSI after 15 minutes in the original temperature

Besides being actual science - something painfully missing from this discussion both on this site and in the media - I believe it explains why the Colts balls had a PSI of 13.5 when measured after the game. Not that their balls maintained a PSI of 13.5 during the entire game, only that the balls had returned to that PSI when measured indoors after the game.

BTW, if you missed my brilliantly presented theory on the last page, the short version is that I believe that the Pats did not deflate the balls after approval by the refs. Rather, they submitted under inflated balls before the game that the refs approved without proper testing. If my theory is true, we will never know what the actual PSI of the Patriots’ balls was pre-game, and thus never know what kind of temperature related PSI decrease, and indoor warming rebound, the half-time measurements actually showed.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

WreckingCrew, you keep asserting that the Colts footballs were determined to have a psi of 13.5. Where are you getting that information?

So far, I’ve only seen Patriot fans speculating that the Colts balls were that high because they need it to be the case for their defense.

[storyteller0910]

@Hamlet

Its’ one criteria, sure. You don’t think that discipline enacted is relevant to determining the guilt of the parties?

Interesting take.

No, I do not think the discipline enacted is relevant in general to the determining the severity or importance of the offense. I especially do not think this in the case of the NFL, whose imposition of discipline has been inconsistent and bordering on irrational for many years (and most especially of late).

Put a different way: every NFL team skirts the rules in one way or another. Let us take five hypothetical teams: Team A videotapes opponents’ practices; Team B videotapes defensive signals from a place where it’s not allowed; Team C cheats the salary cap; Team D has major contributors using PEDs; Team E fakes injuries in order to save time outs in key situations.

All of these teams are cheating, to one degree or another.

I contend that we should be measuring the severity of the offense by its likely impact on competitive balance - on how much advantage the cheating actually affords the team that’s doing the cheating.

In my estimation, of the five imaginary teams above, Team C is upsetting the balance most obviously: they get to surround their existing stars with much better talent than they could ever afford playing by the rules - they even get to import a Hall of Fame caliber cornerback midseason when other contending teams can’t add salary at all.

Team D is probably next, since PEDs are obviously likely to artificially improve performance.

Team A next - videotaping an opponent’s practices could definitely give unearned insight into their game plan and even the actual plays they’ll be running.

Team E is gaining a tiny little advantage by what they’re doing. It’s minor.

Team B is getting virtually no real advantage from what they’re doing. It is unequivocally against the rules, unequivocally “cheating” by any standard, but in my opinion it’s incredibly small potatoes.

Your argument seems to be that because the NFL punished Team B most severely, I should for that reason alone view their offense most severely. That seems like a remarkably facile way to judge it (particularly for a league that, at least initially, thought 2 games and a whole season were the appropriate respective suspensions for a violent assault and recreational drug use).

I contend that you’re using this metric solely because you don’t like the Patriots - because they have been spectacularly successful for 15 years, more so than your team (or, really, any team) - and you’re looking for a way, any way no matter how stretched, to discredit their accomplishments.

[Hamlet]

@storyteller0910

Your argument seems to be that because the NFL punished Team B most severely, I should for that reason alone view their offense most severely.

Not at all. It is, as all things, simply evidence put into the determination. To me, the fact Bellicheck got a huge fine and forfeited a first round draft pick, is evidence that the NFL finds their conduct more dirty than say the Lions forfeiting a 7th rounder for tampering or the Patriots forfeiting a third round pick for illegally using the IR designation. You don’t have to feel the same way, of course. You are free to wave it all away and pretend that the NFL is out to get the Patriots, but I think the NFL is a better determiner of the severity of the action than say, an heavily invested Patriot fan who has to resort to speculation about other teams, make up hypotheticals, or demand a full recounting of the precise nature of every possible rule breaking before determining a team is dirty or not.

Again, you can disagree.

[Telemark]

@storyteller0910

Team A next - videotaping an opponent’s practices could definitely give unearned insight into their game plan and even the actual plays they’ll be running.

This never happened, or at least no evidence of this was ever produced. IIRC, the person who made the initial charge retracted it.

Spygate was for taping the opposing sideline during a game from a position not approved by the league. Taping the sideline is permitted and done by many/most teams. But it must be done from an approved position (under a permanent roof). The Pats were warned about doing this and did so after being warned. It was a violation of the rules, it was pretty stupid, but it didn’t really give them any competitive advantage.

ETA: I see that you weren’t accusing the Pats of doing this, sorry for misreading your post.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

Isn’t it funny how the Patriots keep doing things that are illegal but that do not provide them with any competitive advantage? Are they just stupid? Oppositional? One would think they’d focus on only doing things that would help them win, especially if they risked any cost for doing them.

[Hamlet]

@Telemark

Spygate was for taping the opposing sideline during a game from a position not approved by the league. Taping the sideline is permitted and done by many/most teams. But it must be done from an approved position (under a permanent roof). The Pats were warned about doing this and did so after being warned. It was a violation of the rules, it was pretty stupid, but it didn’t really give them any competitive advantage.

I really don’t want to rehash the entire Spygate thing, but I think portraying at, as you try, that the only problem was that they were videotaping from the wrong spot, isn’t fully truthful. The reason it was a problem was that they were videotaping defensive signals, which is illegal. If it were simply a problem that the place they were taping from didn’t have a roof, there is no way they would have gotten the punishment they did. Attempting to steal defensive signals - legal. Videotaping signals - illegal.

[storyteller0910]

@Hamlet

Not at all. It is, as all things, simply evidence put into the determination. To me, the fact Bellicheck got a huge fine and forfeited a first round draft pick, is evidence that the NFL finds their conduct more dirty than say the Lions forfeiting a 7th rounder for tampering or the Patriots forfeiting a third round pick for illegally using the IR designation. You don’t have to feel the same way, of course.

Sure. It’s evidence the NFL finds their conduct more dirty than that of the Lions. I am not obligated to agree with the NFL, and considering that the NFL also apparently finds recreational drug use more problematic than off the field violence, I’m going to stick with my own assessments instead of theirs.

You are free to wave it all away and pretend that the NFL is out to get the Patriots, but I think the NFL is a better determiner of the severity of the action than say, an heavily invested Patriot fan who has to resort to speculation about other teams, make up hypotheticals, or demand a full recounting of the precise nature of every possible rule breaking before determining a team is dirty or not.

The NFL might be a better determiner of the severity of the offense than a Patriots’ fan. Fortunately, I’m neither of those entities, and needn’t follow either of their opinions blindly. And I think I’m better able to judge the seriousness of a given offense than somebody who clearly brings an anti-Patriots bias to the discussion in the first place (as you and Hentor do, in my opinion).

I’m a guy with zero vested interest - I neither root for nor dislike the Patriots - and I’m looking dispassionately at what I see and find that the Patriots acts were small potatoes compared to, for example, the Broncos and 49ers abuses of the salary cap.

Further - again from the standpoint of a person with no dog in the fight - I feel free to say that none of it matters to me anyway. In my experience every team gets away with as much as they can, whether it’s barely within the lines or well outside. Every team cheats, in ways big and small, and I’m free to decide for myself whether any given instance of cheating actually matters in some larger sense. I don’t think Spygate mattered literally at all; I certainly don’t think this ball inflation nonsense matters more than the tiniest bit.

P.S. I don’t think the NFL is “out to get” the Patriots. I think large portions of the media and fanbase are, simply because it is in the nature of the sports community to try to rip down anyone who excels too much for too long. I think in the case of Spygate, the NFL - as it is wont to do - reacted to the public response rather than the facts of the case. I would also point out, by the way, that if your metric is “NFL punishment” than you should have nothing at all to say about the ball deflation issue, as the NFL has not even found that the Patriots did anything wrong, let alone issued punishment for it.

[Hamlet]

@storyteller0910

Sure. It’s evidence the NFL finds their conduct more dirty than that of the Lions. I am not obligated to agree with the NFL, and considering that the NFL also apparently finds recreational drug use more problematic than off the field violence, I’m going to stick with my own assessments instead of theirs.

Feel free. While the NFL has surely made mistakes in their punishments (Ray Rice for one), I still will have more faith in their determinations of guilt and the severity of offense (especially for competitive advantage problems) than some anonymous poster on a message board. I don’t find “the NFL is too mean on pot smokers and not mean enough to wife beaters” to be compelling evidence that they were wrong in their determinations on Spygate.

@storyteller

I don’t think Spygate mattered literally at all; I certainly don’t think this ball inflation nonsense matters more than the tiniest bit.

I disagree with you on spygate and agree, for the most part, on the ball inflation thing. Fortunately, the NFL agrees with me on Spygate. We’ll see what they do on the ball inflation thing, but I don’t imagine it will be very much, which is fine by me.

[fachverwirrt]

@WreckingCrew

So, to get back to the actual topic and to add some science to a site dedicated to fighting ignorance, let me share with you an experiment someone on another site I post on ran. Now, I know: 1 guy, Pats fan, single data point, not the same conditions . . . fine. I am not using this data to prove or disprove what the Patriots did, or did not do, to the game balls, just as a point of interest to this discussion.

First off, I assume we all agree that a change in temperature changes the PSI in a football. If not, stop reading here. How much of a change is still open to debate - however, what this test shows is just how fast the recovery time is when the ball is returned to the original temperature - something I haven’t seen anyone else look at.

"So, to repeat, starting pressure at 13.0 in about 71 degree conditions. I deflated the football and filled it with a hand pump to 13.0, and tested it after 10 minutes and after 20 minutes in the same room to make sure it was holding steady at 13.0 and it was. Straight into 39 degrees for 35 minutes. Time zero was when I brought it back to 71 degrees.

Time zero: 11.0 p.s.i

• 1 minute: 11.3 psi
• 2 minutes: 11.6 psi
• 4 minutes: 11.95-12.0 psi
• 7 minutes 12.4 psi
• 9 minutes 12.6 psi
• 12 minutes: 12.75 psi
• 15 minutes 12.95 psi"

This test shows that after only 15 minutes of being back in room temperature, the football had returned to within .05 PSI of its original level. Therefore, to those of you who ask “how come there wasn’t any change in the Colts’ footballs?” I ask, when did the refs test them? Did they do the Patriots’ balls first, and the Colts’ balls second? Was there any delay in-between the tests?

Also, Florio was on the radio today and confirmed once again that the NFL has not yet released the pre-game PSI of any team’s balls, nor the half-time PSI of the Colts’ balls. So until those numbers are released - if they exist - knowing that the Colts’ balls tested at 13.5 PSI after the game tells us nothing about the condition of those balls during the game - especially since this test shows that the return to the original PSI is so swift.

If the NFL is going to make this PSI thing a big deal, I think they are going to have to use more balls and do testing and refilling during all cold weather games. After all of this discussion it is pretty obvious that the PSI does drop in cold weather. Whether or not it effects play can still be debated, but science shows it does happen. Perhaps that is why Rodgers likes it above 13.5 to start with, because I imagine that by the second quarter in Green Bay in December his balls have shriveled up quite a bit.

@Hentor_the_Barbarian

**WreckingCrew **, you seem to be suggesting that the demonstration you described would argue in the Pats favor, somehow.

A rapid recovery in psi would argue against them. Unless the balls were tested right on the field (which seems highly unlikely), they would have spent several minutes in transit to wherever they were tested.

Within 2 minutes, they would have already recovered .6 psi. Within 4 minutes they would have recovered nearly 1 full psi.

So this whole “temperature change caused the deflation” thing is dramatically undone by that demonstration. It almost certainly would have taken the refs more than 4 minutes to walk the balls to test them, get set up and get to testing.

I’m with Hentor on this one. The experiment as it stands does far more to hurt the “temperature deflation” theory than it does to help it.

[WreckingCrew]

@Hentor_the_Barbarian

WreckingCrew, you keep asserting that the Colts footballs were determined to have a psi of 13.5. Where are you getting that information?

So far, I’ve only seen Patriot fans speculating that the Colts balls were that high because they need it to be the case for their defense.

Yes, Hentoryou are correct. We don’t have that number yet. In fact I’m not even sure the NFL has confirmed the Colts even played in that game. But I appreciate the correction, because I am actually trying to look at some science here.

To address the greater issue, and fachverwirrt’s point directly above, I have never said that temperature deflation is the only possible reason the Patriots’ balls were found to be low at halftime. In fact, I am fairly certain that they started the game with low PSI balls the refs approved, but never measured before the game. So don’t look at this as a defense of the Patriots, by my thinking they did not break any rules, but they certainly counted on a lack of attentiveness on the part of the refs to give them an advantage.

However, I did want to show a simple experiment to refute the claim that some have made that the cold could not have had any effect on the PSI of the Patriot’s balls, because the Colts balls did not change. Or even a more refined example of that argument, based on the correction that Hentor made above to my older post, is that at the cold could not have made enough of a difference to account for the decrease in the Patriots’ balls PSI, because the Colts balls stayed legal.

The experiment I quoted shows that it is entirely possible that both team’s balls lost PSI due to the cold - maybe even both teams were at some point playing with illegal balls, but that after a short period of time in a room temperature environment could be found as legal again.

You may feel free to defame my team, but don’t fuck with science to do it.

In fact I will take it a step further to add more ammo to the anti- Patriots crowd. Belichick said in his statement he asks the refs to inflate to 12.5 PSI - the minimum allowed. It seems like just his style of gamesmanship to ask for that on cold days knowing full well that within a few minutes the PSI will have dropped and he can get his preferred PSI completely legally - with the cooperation of the game officials.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

Please - let’s not pretend that any of this is in the service of science. This has all been Patriots’ fans trying to construct scenarios in which the Patriots don’t come off like stinky cheaters again.

“If the Colts balls started at 13.5 psi, and the Pats rubbed their balls with a wire brush in the sauna and then on the field the Colts balls stayed drier and then the refs checked the Colts balls last, then everything’s good!”

That’s not science, that’s an agenda.

[WreckingCrew]

No, but you have proven to be nothing more than a pathetic excuse. I flat out stated that I think the Patriots submitted under inflated balls. I then try to bring some actual science to this discussion. And as pointed out by fachverwirrt, the science I brought doesn’t in any way exonerate the Patriots, I only presented it to eliminate one of the wilder rantings of the debate. I didn’t mention saunas, wire brushes, dry versus wet. Any of it. I also specifically said the data I provided was not meant in any way to replicate what happened during the game last week, or provide an excuse for the measured PSI.

I just showed the results of a simple experiment that showed not only do balls lose PSI in the cold, they quickly go back to their original state. You could even latch onto that info to make a stronger argument for your side if you wished to.

But you just throw it aside, you prefer to remain ignorant. You are far more interested in the doings in the restrooms of Gillette Stadium.

[aceplace57]

I hope from now on the referees dab the valve hole with paint or something similar. That way it will be detectable if a pin is inserted to inflate or deflate the ball.

A simple and effective solution to keep this from happening again. I’m surprised this isn’t already standard practice.

[ElvisL1ves]

@Hamlet

A criteria.

@Hamlet

Its’ one criteria, sure.

The singular is criterion.

@Hamlet

To me, the fact Bellicheck got a huge fine

Belichick.

See, there you go again making shit up.

Don’t post drunk.

@Hentor_the_Barbarian

Please - let’s not pretend that any of this is in the service of science. This has all been Patriots’ fans trying to construct scenarios in which the Patriots don’t come off like stinky cheaters again.

Says the guy postulating the existence of a ball sauna.

That’s not science, that’s an agenda.

Time for your bottle again?

[ElvisL1ves]

@Hentor_the_Barbarian

Some of it.

Try harder next time.

And it’s pure insanity to suggest that somehow, the Colts balls didn’t get wet.

Nobody but you said that.

You seem to be suggesting that since the Patriots had nearly double the time of possession of the Colts, the Patriots’ balls would be twice as wet. That’s just stupid.

That is entirely your own statement, and yes, it’s stupid.

I’ll just say that this thread is certainly giving me a better impression of who you are, ElvisL1ves. Quite different than I appreciated from other interactions with you, so that’s good to know.

Only in your tortured imagination, which leads you to imagine people saying whatever bullshit you feel like denouncing. When you’re ready to rejoin reality, do let us know, will you? There’s a good lad.

[ElvisL1ves]

Wrong forum, sorry for the unnecessary hostility, deserved or not.,

[Idle_Thoughts]

@ElvisL1ves

Wrong forum, sorry for the unnecessary hostility, deserved or not.,

This is coming after I already made a note, so my thought is that it’s time for people in here to make a Pit thread regarding this topic, perhaps.

Just a note in general, not to you specifically. The overall tone the last few posts have been hostile.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

@ElvisL1ves

Wrong forum, sorry for the unnecessary hostility, deserved or not.,

U mad bro?

[fachverwirrt]

@Hentor_the_Barbarian

Please - let’s not pretend that any of this is in the service of science. This has all been Patriots’ fans trying to construct scenarios in which the Patriots don’t come off like stinky cheaters again.

“If the Colts balls started at 13.5 psi, and the Pats rubbed their balls with a wire brush in the sauna and then on the field the Colts balls stayed drier and then the refs checked the Colts balls last, then everything’s good!”

That’s not science, that’s an agenda.

You can believe me or not, but I’m really not all that concerned with whether the Patriots are stinky cheaters or if anyone likes them.

Because at the end of the day we’re talking about a bunch of grown men chasing a ball. And try as I might, I can’t bring myself to care what other people think about a team that honestly I only root for by accident of geography.

On the other hand, I do like arguing on the internet.